Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

This was maybe the worst statement of a day so filled with terrible statements that they crowded one another, like spectators at a duel. Once Gideon would have loved to hear Corona talk to her with that low, breathy intensity, maybe saying “Your biceps … they’re eleven out of ten,” but right now she did not want anyone to talk to her at all. “If I never fought Naberius again I’d be happy,” she said. “He’s a prick.” Corona laughed in a hard, light trill. Then she said smilingly: “You might have to, eventually. But I don’t mean him.” She lunged. Gideon drew, because despite her brain’s long droning white noise her nervous system was still full of adrenaline. She slipped her hand into her gauntlet and was cautious when she met Corona’s shiny Third blade with her own—was surprised at the force behind the blow, at the manic energy in the other girl’s eyes. Gideon pushed down, forcing Corona’s blade aside—and Corona moved with her, sliding her blade down with the pressure, her footwork taking her into a beautiful disengage. She pressed, and it was only a hasty parry on Gideon’s part that kept the Princess at bay. Corona was breathing hard. For a moment Gideon thought that this was the necromancer weakness coming to bear—the lungs already sagging under the strain—but she realised that Corona was excited, and also very nervous. It was like the queenly, confident Corona of old, masked over badly damaged stuffing. This lasted just a moment. She gave a sudden purple, furtive look over Gideon’s shoulder, stiffening and retreating backward, and there was an indrawn breath from the doorway. “Drop it,” barked Naberius Tern. Not fucking likely, thought Gideon—but he skirted far around her reach, lunging past her to curl a hand hard around Corona’s forearm. His eyes were bugged out with alarm. He was in his undershirt, with his collection of rangy and sinuous muscles all being brought to bear on his princess. She sagged mutinously, like a child caught fist-deep in the lollies jar, and he was putting his arm around her. “You can’t,” he was saying, and Gideon realised: he was also terrifically afraid. “You can’t.” Corona made a giving-up sound of incoherent, fruitless rage, muffled by Naberius’s arm. It was, thankfully, not tears. She said something that Gideon missed, and Naberius said in reply: “I won’t tell her. You can’t do this, doll, not now.”

For the second time that day, Gideon drifted away from a scenario she was utterly shut out of, something she did not want to be privy to. The saline tickled her nose as she sheathed her rapier and backtracked away, before Naberius decided he might as well challenge for her keys while she was there, but as she darted a glance over her shoulder he had utterly discarded her presence: he had placed his arm like a crossbar over Corona’s collarbone, and she had bitten him, apparently to soothe her own obscure feelings. Gideon wished for no more part in any of this. Gideon went home. Her feet took her, heavy and unwilling, back to the bone-wreathed door of the Ninth quarters: her hands pushed open the door hard, recklessly. There was no sign of anyone within. The door to the main bedroom was closed, but Gideon pushed that open too, without even knocking. There was nobody there. With the curtains drawn Harrow’s room was dark and still, the bed inhabiting the centre of the room like a big hulking shadow. The sheets were rumpled and unmade. She could see the foetal-curl dent on the mattress where Harrow slept. Pens spilled off the mildewspotted dressing table, and books propped up other, usefuller books on the drawers. The whole room smelled like Harrow: old Locked Tomb veils and preserving salts, ink, the faint smell of her sweat. It skewed harder toward the preserving salts. Gideon stumbled around blindly, kicking the corner of the four-poster bed in the same way that Corona had sunk her teeth into her cavalier’s arm, stubbing her toe, not caring. The wardrobe door was ajar. Gideon made a beeline toward it, pulling it open violently, though she had no heart to sew shut the cuffs on all of Harrowhark’s shirts as she once might have done. She half-expected bone wards to yank both her arms from their sockets, but there was nothing. There was no guard. There was nothing to have ever stopped her doing this. This drove her demented, for some reason. She slapped the rainbow of black clothes aside: neatly patched trousers, neatly pressed shirts, the formal vestments of the Reverend Daughter tied up inside a net bag and hung from a peg. If she looked at them too long she would feel tightchested, so she very forcibly didn’t.

There was a box at the bottom of the cupboard—a cheap polymer box with dents in it, tucked beneath a pair of Harrowhark’s boots. She would not have noticed it except that there had been a cursory attempt to hide it with the aforementioned boots and a badly ripped cloak. It was about a forearm’s length on every side. A sudden exhaustion of everything Harrow had ever locked away drove her to mindlessly pull it out. She eased off the pockmarked top with her thumbs, expecting diaries, or prayer bones, or underwear, or lithographs of Harrow’s mother. With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

30 IN THE FLIMSY-PAPERED LIVING room of the Sixth quarters, Gideon sat staring into a steaming mug of tea. It was grey with the sheer amount of powdered milk stirred into it, and it was her third cup. She had been terribly afraid that they’d put medicines into it, or tranquillizers or something: when she wouldn’t drink, both necromancer and cavalier had taken sips to prove it was unadulterated, with expressions that plainly said idiot. Palamedes had been the one to wait patiently next to her while she had thrown up lavishly in the Sixth’s toilet. Now she sat, haggard and empty, on a spongy mattress they had pulled out as a chair. Protesilaus’s head sat, dead-eyed, on the desk. It looked exactly as it had in life: as though, upon being separated from its trunk, it had entered into some perfect state of preservation to remain boring forever. It looked about as lively as it had when she’d met him. Palamedes was investigating the white gleam of the spinal column at the nape of the neck for maybe the millionth time. Camilla had shoved a mug of hot tea into Gideon’s hands, strapped two swords to her back, and disappeared. This had all happened before Gideon could protest and now she was left alone with Palamedes, her discovery, and a cluster headache. Things were happening too much. She took a hot mouthful, swilled tea around her teeth, and swallowed mechanically. “She’s mine.”

“You’ve said that five times now.” “I mean it. Whatever goes down—whatever happens—you have to let me do it. You have to.” “Gideon—” “What do I do,” she said, quite casually, “if she’s the murderer?” His interest in the spinal column was not abating. Palamedes had slipped his glasses down his long craggy nose, and was holding the head upside down like he was emptying a piggy bank. He had even shone light into the nose and ears and horrible warp of the throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?” “What would you do if you discovered Camilla was a murderer?” “Help her bury the body,” said Palamedes promptly. “Sextus.” “I mean it. If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.” “Everyone wants to tell me about fleshes and ends today,” said Gideon unhappily. “There’s a joke in there somewhere. You’re sure there was nothing else along with the head—bone matter, fingernails, cloth?” “I checked. I’m not a total tool, Palamedes.” “I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.” “She didn’t kill the Fourth or Fifth.” “Conjecture, but we’ll leave it.” “Okay, so,” said Gideon, putting her empty mug next to her mattress. “Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.” (“You shock me,” muttered Palamedes.) “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.”

Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply. “Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon. He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years. Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her, but everyone did. The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs, tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audience all wrapped up in one. And though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry for the Reverend Daughter’s preoccupation. They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene. Everyone acted as though the Emperor had personally resurrected Harrowhark just to bring them joy: she had been born healthy and whole, a prodigious necromancer, a perfect penitent nunlet. She was already mounting the ambo and reading out prayers even as Gideon began desperately praying herself that she might one day go to be an enlisted soldier, which she had wanted ever since Aiglamene—the only person Gideon didn’t hate all the time—had told her she might be one. The captain had told her stories of the Cohort since Gideon was about three. This was probably the best time of their relationship. Back then they clashed so consistently that they were with each other most of the time. They fought each other bloody, for which Harrow was not punished and Gideon was. They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.

By the time Harrow was ten years old, she had glutted herself on secrets. She had grown bored of ancient tomes, bored of the bones she had been raising since before she’d finished growing her first set of teeth, and bored of making Gideon run gauntlets of skeletons. At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door. There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The nuns dropped to their knees at the mere mention of what was through there. It was the brief delight of Gideon’s life that the unnecessarily beatified Harrowhark Nonagesimus chose to ditch her sainthood and unlock it, and that Gideon had been witness to that fact. Out of everyone who found Gideon Nav repellent, Harrow’s parents had always found her particularly so. They were chilly, joyless Ninth House necromancers of the type that Silas Octakiseron seemed to think universally inhabited Drearburh: black in heart, power, and appearance. Once when she had touched a fold of Priamhark Noniusvianus’s vestments he had held her down with skeletal hands and whipped her till she howled. It was only out of the most desperate perversity that she ran straight to them to tell her tale: out of some baffling desire to show some evidence of House loyalty, to absolutely drop Harrow in the shit, to get the pat on the head she knew she’d earned for preserving the integrity and the fervid spirit of the House —precisely the qualities she was so ceaselessly accused of lacking. She felt no flicker of guilt or doubt. Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails. So she told them. And they listened. They had not said a word, either in praise or in censure, but they had listened. They had called for Harrow. And they had made Gideon leave. She waited outside the great dark doors of their room for a very long time, because they hadn’t told her to go away, just go out of the room, and because she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the

coals. But she waited a whole hour and never heard a damn thing, let alone Harrow’s screams as she was confined to oss duty until she turned thirty. And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away. Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever. “I was eleven,” said Gideon. “And here I am, narking all over again.” Palamedes did not say anything. He just sat there, listening as solemnly as if she had described some new type of novel necromantic theorem. Far from feeling cleansed by her impromptu confession, Gideon felt absolutely the opposite: dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs. She was garbage from the neck to the navel. She was packed tight with a dry and dusty mould. She had been filled up with it since she was eleven, on the understanding that as long as she was attached to the House of the Ninth she could never make it go away. Gideon took a long breath, then another. “Harrow wants to become a Lyctor,” she said. “She would do anything to become a Lyctor. She’d easily have killed Dulcinea’s cavalier if she thought it would help her become a Lyctor. Nothing else matters to her. I know that now. In the last couple days, I sometimes thought—” Gideon did not finish that sentence, which would have been “that she had stopped making it her top priority.” Palamedes said very gently, “You really should not need me to tell you that an eleven-year-old isn’t responsible for the suicides of three grown adults.” “Of course I’m responsible,” said Gideon disgustedly. “I made it happen.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes. “If you hadn’t told Harrow’s parents about the door, they would not have made the decision to end their lives. You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one— the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower— those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible. Here’s a confession for you: I killed Magnus and Abigail.” Gideon blinked at him. “If, the second I stepped off my shuttle,” said the suddenly revealed double murderer blithely, “I had snatched Cam’s dagger and put it straight through Teacher’s throat, the Lyctoral trial could never have begun. There’d have been uproar. The Cohort would have arrived, I’d have been dragged away, and everyone else would have been sent safe back home. Because I didn’t kill Teacher, the trial began, and because the trial began, Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent are dead. So: I did it. It’s my fault. All I ask is that you put some pen and flimsy in my cell so I can start on my memoirs.” Gideon blinked a couple more times. “No, hold up. That’s stupid, they’re not the same.” “I don’t see why not,” said the necromancer. “We both made decisions that led to bad things happening.” She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Octakiseron said you guys loved to mess with what words mean.” “The Eighth House thinks there’s right and there’s wrong,” said Palamedes wearily, “and by a series of happy coincidences they always end up being right. Look, Nav. You ratted out your childhood nemesis to get her in trouble. You didn’t kill her parents, and she shouldn’t hate you like you did, and you shouldn’t hate you like you did.” He was peering at her through his spectacles. “Hey,” she objected lamely, “I never said I hated myself.” “Evidence,” he said, “outweighs testimony.” Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go—not when she rummaged in the pocket of her robe with her other hand, and not when she passed over the scrumpled-up piece of flimsy that had bewildered her for so long.

He unscrumpled it, and read without reaction. She squeezed his hand like an oath, or a threat. “This is from a Lyctor lab,” he said eventually. “Isn’t it?” “Yeah,” she admitted. “Is it—I mean—is it real?” He looked at her. “It’s nearly ten thousand years old, if that’s what you mean.” “Well, I’m not,” she said. “So … what the fuck, basically.” “The ultimate question,” he agreed, returning his attention to the flimsy. “Can I borrow this? I’d like to look at it properly.” “Do not show it to anyone else,” Gideon said, without really knowing why. Something about her name being on this ancient piece of garbage felt as dangerous as a live grenade. “I’m serious. It stays between us.” “I swear on my cavalier,” he said. “You can’t even show her—” They were interrupted by six short knocks on the door, followed by six long. Both sprang up to pull apart the interlaced lattice of deadbolts. Camilla came through, and with her, upright and calm, was Harrow. For one wacky moment Gideon thought that she and Camilla had been holding hands and that today was one huge rash of interhousal hand fondling, but then she realised that their wrists were cuffed together. Camilla was nobody’s fool, though how she’d cuffed Harrow was going to be a tale of terror for another day. Gideon did not look at her, and Harrow did not look at Gideon. Gideon very slowly put her hand on her sword, but for nothing. Harrow was looking at Palamedes. She expected pretty much anything, but she didn’t expect him to say— “Nonagesimus—why didn’t you tell me?” “I didn’t trust you,” she said simply. “My original theory was that you’d done it. Septimus wasn’t capable on her own, and it didn’t seem far-fetched that you were working in concert.” “Will you believe me when I say we aren’t?” “Yes,” she said, “because if you were that good you would have killed my cavalier already. I hadn’t even intended to hurt him, Sextus, the head fell off the moment I pushed.” What?

“Then we go,” said Palamedes. “We get everyone. We talk to her. I won’t have any more conversations in the dark, or doubting of my intentions.” Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword. Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying: “I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.” Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window. “Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.” They all crowded into Dulcinea’s little hospital room: it was them and the priest with the salt-and-pepper braid, who scuttled out as though affrighted as they lined the room in stony array. The whole gang had arrived for party times. Palamedes had sent for all the survivors, though considering their current group-wide interest in killing one another the fact that they had bothered coming was nothing short of a miracle. The Second stood against the wall, their jackets less creased than their faces; Ianthe and Coronabeth sat fussily crowded up on each other’s knees, with their cavalier close behind. Silas stood inside the door, Colum stood just behind him, and if anyone had wanted to take them all out then and there it would have been as simple as shutting the door and letting them all asphyxiate on Naberius Tern’s pomade. It seemed so strange that this was now all of them. The necromancer of the Seventh House was propped up on a bundle of fat cushions, looking calm and transparent. With every stridorous breath her shoulders shook, but her hair was perfectly brushed and her nightgown nightmarishly frilly. She had in her lap the box that contained Protesilaus’s head, and when she drew it gently out—wholly unspoiled as if he were still alive—there were several indrawn breaths. Hers was not among them. “My poor boy,” she said, sincerely. “I’ll never be able to put him back together now. Who took him apart? He’s a wreck.” Palamedes steepled his fingers and leaned forward, greyly intent.

“Lady Septimus, Duchess of Rhodes,” he said, very formally, “I put to you before everyone here—that this man was dead before you arrived, by shuttle, at the First House, and appeared alive only through deep flesh magic.” There was an immediate hubbub, uncalmed by his impatient be quiet gestures and the shoving of his spectacles up his nose. Among the collective mutters, Ianthe Tridentarius’s acid drawl was loudest: “Well, this is the only interesting thing she’s ever done.” Nearly as piercing was Captain Deuteros: “Impossible. He’s been with us for weeks.” “It’s not impossible at all,” said Dulcinea herself. She had been gravely meeting Protesilaus’s murky stare, as though trying to find something out, and now she settled the head on her lap. “The Seventh House have been perfecting the way of the beguiling corpse for years and years and years. It’s just—not entirely allowed.” “It is unholy,” said Silas, flatly. “So is soul siphoning, my child,” she said, in tones of deliberately celestial sweetness. “And it’s not unholy—it’s entirely useful and blameless; just not when you do it like this, which is the very old way. The Seventh aren’t just soul-stoppers and mummifiers. Yes, Pro was dead before we even landed.” Gideon said, just as flatly as Silas: “Why?” Those enormous flower-blue eyes turned to Gideon as though she were the only person in the room. There was no laughter in them, or else Gideon might have started to yell. Suddenly, the dying necromancer seemed enormously old; not with wrinkles, but with the sheer dignity and quiet with which she sat there, totally serene. “This competition caught out my House,” she said baldly. “Let me tell you the story. Dulcinea Septimus was never intended to be here, Gideon the Ninth  … they would have preferred she be laid up at home and have another six months wrung out of her. It’s an old story of the House. But there wasn’t another necromantic heir. And there was a very good cavalier primary … so even if the necromantic heir was one bad cold away from full lung collapse … it was thought that he might even the odds. But then he had an accident.”

Dulcinea fretted the dull hair of the head with her fingertips, then smoothed it out as if it were a doll’s. “Hypothetically. If you were the Seventh House, and all your fortunes were now represented in two dead bodies, one breathing a little bit more than the other, wouldn’t you consider something far-fetched? Let’s say, by utilizing the way of the beguiling corpse, and hoping that nobody noticed that your House was DOA? I’m sorry for deceiving you, but I’m not sorry I came.” “That doesn’t add up.” Harrow was stiff as concrete. Her eyes were huge and dark, and though only Gideon could tell, very agitated. “The spell you’re talking about is not within the range of a normal necromancer, Septimus. Impossible for a necromancer in their prime, let alone a dying woman.” “A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe. “I wish I could get rid of that idea. Maybe for the final ten minutes,” said Palamedes. “The technical fact that dying enhances your necromancy is vitiated considerably by the fact that you can’t make any use of it. You might have access to a very personal source of thanergy, but considering your organs are shutting down—” “It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth. “You seem to know a lot about it. Well, I put it to you: Would it be possible for all the heads of the Seventh House,” said Dulcinea calmly, “adepts of the perfect death—a Seventh House mystic secret, one that’s been ours forever—working all in concert?” “Perhaps initially, but—” “King Undying,” said Silas, primly disgusted. “It was a conspiracy.” “Oh, sit on it,” said Dulcinea. “I know all about you and your house, Master Silas Octakiseron … the Emperor himself never bothered to speak out against beguiling corpsehood, but he did say that siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up, and ought only to be done with the siphoner in cuffs.” “That does not mitigate the penalty for performing a necromantic act of transgression—” “I’ve no interest in meting out the justice of the tome,” said Captain Deuteros, gruffly. “I know that’s the Eighth House’s prerogative. But at the same time, Master Octakiseron, we cannot afford this right now.”

“A woman who would be party to this kind of magic,” said Silas, “might be party to anything.” The woman who was party to that kind of magic and therefore maybe party to anything opened her mouth to speak, but instead had a coughing fit that seemed to start at her toes and go all the way up. Her spine arched; she bleated, and then began to moistly choke to death. Her face turned so grey that for a moment Gideon was convinced the Eighth House was doing something to her, but it was a block of phlegm rather than her soul being sucked out. Palamedes went for her, as did Camilla. He turned her over on her side, and she did something awful and complicated with her finger inside Dulcinea’s mouth. The head on her lap went rolling, and was caught only by the quick reflexes of Princess Ianthe, who cupped it between her hands like an exotic butterfly. “What do you want, Octakiseron?” said the captain in the wake of this, stone-faced. “Room confinement? A death sentence? Both are uncharacteristically easy to fulfil in this instance.” “I understand your point,” said Silas. “I do not agree with it. I will take my leave, madam. This is not interesting to me anymore.” His exit was arrested by his cavalier, as brown and as careworn as ever, standing between him and the doorway. Colum did not really seem to notice his necromancer’s attempts to leave. “The furnace,” he said shortly. “If we’ve got his head, what’s in the furnace?” Dulcinea, grey and squirming, managed: “What did you find in the fu— fur—fur—” before Palamedes slapped her on the back, at which point she coughed up what looked like a ball of bloody twigs. The Third turned their faces away. Captain Deuteros did not: maybe she’d seen worse. She gestured to her lieutenant, who had removed the head none too gently from Ianthe’s fascinated gaze and was boxing it up as though it were an unwanted meal. The captain moved closer to Harrow and Gideon, and demanded: “Who found him?” “I did,” said Harrow, casually failing to provide any details on how. “I took the head because I couldn’t readily transport the body. The body has since disappeared through unknown means, though I’ve got my suspicions. The skull’s mine by finder’s rights—”

“Ninth, the head is going in the morgue where it belongs,” said the captain. “You don’t have carrion rights over found murders, and today is not the day when I’ll countenance your House taking bones that don’t belong to it.” “I agree with Judith,” said Corona. She had pushed her twin off her thigh, and was looking a bit green around her lovely gills. She also looked uncharacteristically tired and careworn, though she managed to pull this off with a certain pensive loveliness to the fine crinkles at her eyes and mouth. “Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.” “Sheer prevarication,” remarked her sister to nobody in particular. “Some people will do anything to get … a head.” Everyone ignored her, even Gideon, who found herself trembling like a leaf. Harrowhark said merely, “The furnace bones are still mine to identify.” “You can utilise the morgue all you like,” said the captain dismissively. “But the bodies aren’t your property, Reverend Daughter. That goes for the Warden, that goes for everybody. Do I make myself clear, or shall I repeat?” “Understood,” said Palamedes. “Understood,” said the Reverend Daughter, in the tones of someone who neither understood nor intended to. Silas had not left. “In that case,” he said, “I consider it my bounden duty to take watch over the morgue, in case the Ninth forgets what constitutes defilement of the bodies. I will take the remains. You may find me there.” Captain Deuteros did not roll her eyes. She gestured to her lieutenant, who handed over the box: Silas took it and winced faintly, and then passed it to his nephew. Gruesome parcel secured, they finally turned and left. The Third were already starting to bitch— “I always said he didn’t look right,” said the cavalier. “You said no such thing,” said the first twin. “At no point did you ever say that,” said the second twin. “Excuse you, I did—” Captain Deuteros cleared her throat over the fresh internecine squabbling. “Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”

Palamedes had been wiping Dulcinea’s mouth very gently with a white cloth. He laid his hand at her neck. She was still. Her face was now the thin blue-white colour of Canaan House’s milk, and for a moment Gideon expected him to add her to the already dead list. She would decide to go out with an audience, with her hair done, and with her miserable secrets revealed. Now she knew that Dulcinea had always been alone, carrying on an even greater farce than Gideon’s, knowing the impossibility of the odds. But the dying necromancer sucked in a sudden, rattling, popped-balloon breath, her whole body surging in spasm. Gideon’s heart started up again. Before she could move, Palamedes was there, and with terrible tenderness —as though they were alone in the room and the world alike—he kissed the back of Dulcinea’s hand. Gideon looked away, blushing with a shame she didn’t interrogate, and found Teacher in the doorway with his hands folded before his gaudy rainbow sash. Nobody had heard him enter. “Maybe later, Lady Judith,” he said. She said, “You’ll need to contact the Seventh House and have her sent back home. It’s morally and legally out of the question to leave her this way. Is that clear?” “I cannot,” said Teacher. “There was only ever a single communications channel in Canaan House, my Lady … and I cannot call her House on it. I cannot call the Fifth, nor the Fourth, nor now the Seventh. That is part of the sacred silence we keep. There will be an end to all this, and there will be a reckoning … but Lady Septimus will stay with us until the last.” The Second’s adept had stopped all of a sudden. For a moment Gideon thought she was going to lose her carefully buttoned rag. But she cocked her dark head and said, “Lieutenant?” “Ready,” said Marta the Second, and they both marched out as though they were in parade formation. They did not give the rest of the room a backward glance. Teacher looked at the tableau before him: the bed, the blood, the Third. Palamedes, still clutching Dulcinea’s fingers within his own, and Dulcinea out cold. “How long does Lady Septimus have?” he asked. “I can no longer tell.” “Days. Weeks, if we’re lucky,” said Palamedes bluntly. Dulcinea made a little hiccupping noise on the bed that sounded half like a giggle and half

like a sigh. “That’s if we keep the windows open and her airways clear. Breathing recyc at Rhodes probably took ten years off her life. She’s been sitting on the brink without shifting one way or the other—the woman has the stamina of a steam engine—and all we can do is keep her comfortable and see if she doesn’t decide to pull through.” Harrow said to him, slowly: “Undoing the cavalier’s bodywork should have killed her. It would have been an incredible shock to her system.” “Spreading it between multiple casters may have diluted the feedback.” “That is not remotely how it works,” said Ianthe. “Oh, God, here comes the expert,” Naberius said. “Babs,” said Ianthe’s sister hurriedly, “you’re getting hangry. Let’s go find some food.” Gideon watched her necromancer’s gaze fix on Ianthe Tridentarius. Ianthe did not notice, or affected not to notice; her eyes were as pale and purple and calm as they ever were, but Harrowhark was quivering like a maggot next to a dead duck. As the Third traipsed out—as noisy as if they were leaving a play, not a sickroom—Harrow’s eyes went with them. Gideon said aloud, “Hey. Palamedes. Do you need someone to stay with her?” “I will,” said Teacher, before Palamedes could respond. “I will move my bed here. I will not leave her alone again. Whenever I must leave my post one of the other priests will take my place. I can do that much, at least … I am not afraid, nor do I have better things to do with my time. Whereas—I am very much afraid—you do.” Gideon allowed herself a lingering look at Dulcinea, who made for a more beguiling corpse than her stolid dead cavalier ever did: lying on the bed looking nearly transparent with streaks of drying, bloodied mucus on her chin. She wanted to help, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrow moving out of the doorway and into the corridor—staring after the disappearing Third—and she steeled herself to say, “Then we’re out. Can you—let us know if anything changes?” “Someone will come for you,” said Teacher gently. “Cool. Palamedes—” He met her eye. He had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with one of his innumerable handkerchiefs.

“Ninth,” he said, “if she were capable of anything, in order to become a Lyctor—don’t you think she’d be one already? If she really wanted to watch the world burn—wouldn’t we all be alight?” “Stop flattering her. But—thanks,” said Gideon, and she darted off into the corridor after Harrow.

31 IN THE CORRIDOR, HER necromancer was staring distantly down the passageway at the disappearing hems of the Third: her brow had furrowed a wrinkle into her paint. Gideon had intended to—she had intended to do a lot of things; but Harrow left her no opening for the actions she’d planned and offered none of the answers she’d wanted. She simply turned in a swish of black cloth and said, “Follow me.” Gideon had prepared beforehand a fuck-you salvo so long and so loud that Harrow would have to be taken away to be killed; but then Harrow added, “Please.” This please convinced Gideon to follow her in silence. She had more or less expected Harrow to lead with “What were you doing in my closet,” at which point Gideon might well have shaken her until the teeth in her head and the teeth in her pockets all rattled. Harrowhark swept down the stairs two at a time, the treads creaking in panic, as they went down the grand flight that led them to the atrium: from there, down one corridor, down another, one left, and then down the steps to the training rooms. Harrow ignored the tapestry that would have taken them to the hidden corridor and the ransacked Lyctor laboratory where Jeannemary had died, and instead pushed open the big dark doors to the pool. Once there, she tossed down two grubby knuckles from her pockets. A substantial skeleton sprang from each, unfurling. They stood before the

door, linked elbows, and held it shut. She scattered another handful of chips like pale grain; skeletons rose, forming and expanding the bone as though bubbling up from it. They made themselves a perimeter around the whole room, pressing the knobbles of their spines against the old ceramic tile and standing to attention. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, as though bodyguards, or hideous chaperones. Harrow turned to face Gideon, and her eyes were as black and inexorable as a gravity collapse. “The time has come—” She took a deep breath; and then she undid the catches to her robes, and they fell away from her thin shoulders to puddle around her ankles on the floor. “—to tell you everything,” she said. “Oh, thank God for that,” said Gideon hysterically, profoundly embarrassed at how her heart rate had spiked. “Shut up and get in the pool.” This was so unanticipated that she didn’t bother to question, or to complain, or even to hesitate. Gideon unhooked her robe and hood and pulled off her shoes, unstrapped her rapier and the belt that held her gauntlet. Harrow seemed ready to enter the greenly lapping waves wearing her trousers and shirt, so Gideon figured Oh well, what the hell and made the plunge almost fully clothed. She jumped in recklessly: tidal waves exploded outward at her passing, peppering the stone sides of the pool with droplets, gushing and foaming. The seamy, distasteful feeling of water seeping through her underwear hit her all at once. Gideon spluttered, and ducked her head beneath, and spat out a mouthful of liquid that was warm as blood. After a moment’s consideration, Harrow stepped in too—walking off the side carelessly, slipping beneath the water like a clean black knife. She disappeared beneath the surface, then emerged, gasping, spluttering in a way that ruined everything about the portentous entrance. She faced Gideon and trod water, flapping her arms a little before she managed to get her toes touching the bottom. “Are we in here for a reason?” Their voices echoed.

“The Ninth House has a secret, Nav,” said Harrow. She sounded calm and measured and frank in a way she’d never been before. “Only my family knows of it. And even we could never discuss it, unless—this was my mother’s rule—we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that—if I really am to betray my family’s most sacred trust—I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.” Gideon blinked. “Oh shit,” she said. “You really meant it. This is it. This is go time.” “This is go time,” agreed Harrowhark. Gideon swept both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar. Eventually, all she said was, “Why?” “The reasons are multitudinous,” said her necromancer. Her paint was wearing off in the water; she looked like a grey picture of a melting skeleton. “I had—intended to let you know some of it, before. An expurgated version. And then you looked in my closet … If I had told you my suspicions about Septimus’s meat-puppet on the first day, none of this would have happened.” “The first day?” “Griddle,” said Harrow, “I have not puppeted my own parents around for five years and learned nothing.” Anger did seep into Gideon then, along with a couple more litres of salt water. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me when you killed him?” “I didn’t kill him,” said Harrowhark sharply. “Someone else did—blade through the heart, from what I saw, though I only got a few minutes to look before I had to run. I only had to push the theorem the most basic bit before he came apart. I took the head and left when I thought I heard someone coming. This was the night after we completed the entropy field challenge.” “No, you monster’s ass,” said Gideon coldly. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you’d killed him before you sent Jeannemary Chatur and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn’t you take the moment to say, I don’t know, Let’s not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.” Harrow exhaled.

“I panicked,” she said. “At the time I thought I was sending you down a blind tunnel, and that the real danger was Sextus and Septimus; that either one might ambush you, and that the sensible solution was to take them both on myself. My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant.” “Nonagesimus, all you had to do was delay, tell me you were freaking out. All you had to do was say that Dulcinea’s cav was a mummy man—” “I had reason to believe,” said Harrow, “that you would trust her more than you trusted me.” This answer contorted Gideon’s face into her best are you fucking kidding me expression. Opposite, Harrow smoothed her forehead out with her thumbs, which took away another significant portion of skeleton. “I thought you were compromised,” she continued waspishly. “I assumed you would assume that I dismantled the puppet as an act of bad faith and go straight to the Seventh. I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I—I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your— equilibrium.” “Harrow,” said Gideon, “if my heart had a dick you would kick it.” “I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we were on a more even footing,” said Harrow, who was stumbling in a way Gideon had never before witnessed. It looked as though she were ransacking drawers in her brain trying to find the right set of words to wear. “Our—we— It was too tenuous to risk. And then…” Too tenuous to risk. “Harrow,” said Gideon again, more slowly, “if I hadn’t gone to Palamedes—and I nearly didn’t go to Palamedes—I would have waited for you in our rooms, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind everything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.” “I didn’t—I don’t—I never have,” said Harrow, “and—I know.” “You would have killed me.” “Or vice versa.” This surprised her into silence. The wavelets sploshed gently at the tiled edges of the pool. Gideon kicked off the bottom and fluttered her feet back and forth, bobbing, her shirt billowing out with water.

“Okay,” she said eventually. “Question time. Who did all the murders?” “Nav.” “I mean it. What’s happening? Is Canaan House haunted, or what? What —who—killed the Fourth and the Fifth?” Her necromancer also pulled her feet up from the bottom and floated, momentarily, chin-deep in green salt water. Her eyes were narrowed in thought. “I can’t say,” she said. “Sorry. That’s not a fruitful line of inquiry. We are being pursued by revenants, or it’s all part of the challenge, or one, or more, of us is picking off the others. The murders of the Fifth and the Fourth may be connected, or not. The bone fragments found in everyone’s wounds don’t match, naturally—but I believe their very particle formation points to the same type of necromantic construction, no matter what Sextus says about topological resonance and skeletal archetype theory…” “Harrow, don’t make me drown myself.” “My conclusion: if the murders are linked and if some adept, rather than a revenant force or the facility itself, is behind the construct you saw—then it is one of us,” said Harrow. “We’re the only living beings in Canaan House. That means the suspect list is the Tridentarii; Sextus; Octakiseron; the Second; or myself. And I haven’t discounted Teacher and the priests. Septimus has something of an alibi—” “Yes, being nearly dead,” said Gideon. Harrowhark said, rather grudgingly: “I’ve downgraded her in some respects. Logically, judging by ability, and mind, and the facility to combine both in service to an end, it’s Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier.” She shook her head as Gideon opened her mouth to protest. “No, I realise neither has, as you might put it, a fucking motive. A logical conclusion is worth very little if I don’t have all the facts. Then there’s Teacher—and the Lyctor laboratories—and the rules. Why those theorems? What powers them? Why was the Fourth cavalier killed, but you left alive?” These were all questions that Gideon had privately asked the dead of night many times since Jeannemary had died. She let her shoulders slide back into the water until it was cold up to the backs of her ears, staring at the single fluorescing bar that swung above the pool. Her body floated, weightless, in a puddle of yellow light. She could have asked Harrow anything: she could have asked about the bomb that had taken Ortus Nigenad’s life instead of hers, or she could have asked about her whole

entire existence, why it had happened and for what reason. Instead, she found herself asking: “What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids—the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?” The silence was terrible. It lasted for such a long time that she wondered if Harrow had slyly drowned herself in the interim, until— “It didn’t happen before I was born,” said the other girl, sounding very unlike herself. “Or at least, that’s not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived.” “That’s unwholesomely specific.” “It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.” Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.” “Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.” The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, wetly. “Harrow,” she said slowly, “by resources, are you saying—” “Two hundred children,” said Harrowhark tiredly. “From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system.” From somewhere beneath the pool, a filter made blurting sounds as it recycled the spilloff. Harrow said, “The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do—for some reason.” Gideon couldn’t hear this. She held her knees to the chest and let herself go under, just for a moment. The water sluiced over her head and through her hair. Her ears roared, then popped. When she pushed above the surface again, the noise of her heartbeat thumping through her skull was like an explosion. “Say something,” said Harrowhark.

“Gross,” said Gideon dully. “Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all that?” “It let me be born,” said the necromancer. “And I was—me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle—I am the whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future—because there is no future without me.” Gideon’s stomach churned, but her brain was more urgent than her nausea. “Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?” There was a pause. “We didn’t,” said Harrow. “What?” “You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.” The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day. The world revolved as Harrow floated closer. Memory took Pelleamena’s steady gaze, and refocused the way it slid through and over Gideon from contempt to dread. It took the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathed it again in horror, not in repugnance. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House. No wonder she had hated the huge dark doors of Drearburh: beyond that portal lurked the used-up, emptied-out shades of a bunch of kids whose main sin in life was that they’d be good batteries. “And do you think you’re worth it?” she asked bluntly.

Next to her, Harrow didn’t flinch. “If I became a Lyctor,” she said meditatively, “and renewed my House—and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor—if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…” Gideon waited. “Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.” She stood up. Gideon watched as sheets of seawater slicked down her shoulders, her hair a wet black cap on her skull, her skin sheening grey and green from the waves. All the paint had rubbed off, and Harrowhark looked thin and haggard and no older than Jeannemary Chatur. “But I’d do it again,” said the war crime. “I’d do it again, if I had to. My parents did it because there was no other way, and they didn’t even know. I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav  … because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer can roll away the stone … I found that only the perfect necromancer can pass through those wards and live, and approach the sarcophagus.” Gideon’s toes found purchase and she stood, chest deep in water, goosebumped all over from the cold. “What happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?” “My parents didn’t understand either, and that’s why they died,” said Harrowhark. “That’s why, when they knew I’d done it—that I’d rolled away the stone and that I’d gone through the monument and that I had seen the place where the body was buried—they thought I’d betrayed God. The Locked Tomb’s meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn’t. And that’s how the Ninth House was made.”

Gideon remembered Silas Octakiseron: The Eighth never forgot that the Ninth was never meant to be. “Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old— you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?” “Yes,” said Harrowhark. “Why?” There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour. “I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.” She lifted her gaze. She held Gideon’s. “But you came back instead,” said Gideon. “I’d told the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father what I’d seen you do. I killed your parents.” “What? My parents killed my parents. I should know.” “But I told them—” “My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed,” said Harrow tightly. “They thought it was the only honourable thing to do.” “I think your parents must’ve been frightened and ashamed for a hell of a long time.” “I’m not saying I didn’t blame you. I did  … it was much easier. I pretended for a long time that I could have saved them by talking to them. Them and Mortus the Ninth. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw … when you saw what I had failed to do. I hated you because you saw what I didn’t do. My mother and father weren’t angry, Nav. They were very kind to me. They tied their own nooses, and then they helped me tie mine. I watched them help Mortus onto the chair. Mortus didn’t even question it, he never did … “But I couldn’t do it. After all I’d convinced myself I was ready to do. I made myself watch, when my parents—I could not do the slightest thing

my House expected of me. Not even then. You’re not the only one who couldn’t die.” The waves lapped, tiny and quiet, around their clothes and their skins. “Harrow,” said Gideon, and her voice caught. “Harrow, I’m so bloody sorry.” Harrow’s eyes snapped wide open. The whites blazed like plasma. The black rings were blacker than the bottom of Drearburh. She waded through the water, snatched Gideon’s wet shirt in her fists, and shook her with more violence than Gideon had ever thought her muscularly capable of. Her face was livid in its hate: her loathing was a mortar, it was combustion. “You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because —I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?” There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air. “I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave— you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.” Gideon braced her shoulders against the weight of what she was about to do. She shed eighteen years of living in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns. In the end her job was surprisingly easy: she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream. They both went into the water, and the world went dark and salty. The Reverend Daughter fell calm and limp, as was natural for one being ritually drowned, but when she realised that she was being hugged she thrashed as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Gideon did not let go. After more than one mouthful of saline, they ended up huddled together in one corner of the shadowy pool, tangled up in each other’s wet shirtsleeves.

Gideon peeled Harrow’s head off her shoulder by the hair and beheld it, taking her inventory: her point-boned, hateful little face, her woeful black brows, the bloodless bow of her lips. She examined the disdainful set of the jaw, the panic in the starless eyes. She pressed her mouth to the place where Harrow’s nose met the bone of her frontal sinus, and the sound that Harrow made embarrassed them both. “Too many words,” said Gideon confidentially. “How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch.” The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: “Say it, loser.” “One flesh—one end,” Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more. After what seemed like a very, very long time, her adept said: “Gideon, you need to promise me something.” Gideon wiped a thumb over her temple, tidied away a stringy lock of shadow-coloured hair; Harrow shuddered. “I thought that this was all about me getting a bunch of concessions and you grovelling, but you called me Gideon, so shoot.” Harrow said, “In the event of my death—Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me—I need you to outlast me. I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Locked Tomb. If I die, I need your duty not to die with me.” “That is such a dick move,” said Gideon reproachfully. “I know,” said Harrow. “I know.” “Harrow, what the hell is in there, that you’d ask that of me?” Her adept closed heavy-lidded eyes. “Beyond the doors there’s just the rock,” she said. “The rock and the tomb surrounded by water. I won’t bore you with the magic or the locks, or the wards or the barriers: just know that it took me a year to walk six steps inside, and that it nearly killed me then. There’s a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit, a way through for the true and devout tombkeeper. I knew in the end it had to open for me. The water’s salt, and it’s

deep, and it moves with a tide that shouldn’t exist. The sepulchre itself is small, and the tomb…” Her eyes opened. A small, astonished smile creased her mouth. The smile transformed her face into an affliction of beauty that Gideon had heretofore managed to ignore. “The tomb is stone and ice, Nav, ice that never melts and stone that’s even colder, and inside, in the dark, there’s a girl.” “A what?” “A girl, you yellow-eyed moron,” said Harrowhark. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and her head was dead weight in Gideon’s hands. “Inside the Locked Tomb is the corpse of a girl. “They packed her in ice—she’s frozen solid—and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat … “Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.” Her voice had the quality of someone in a long dream. She stared through Gideon without looking at her, and Gideon gently took her hands away from Harrow’s jaw. Instead she sat back in the water, buoyed by the salt, her eyes starting to sting from it. They both floated there for a long time in amicable silence, until they pulled themselves up and sat, dripping, on the side of the pool. The salt was crusting up their hair. Gideon reached over to take Harrow’s hand. They sat there, wet through and uncomfortable, fingers curled into each other’s in the half-light, the pool interminably lapping at the cool tiles that surrounded it. The skeletons stood in perfect, silent ranks, not betraying themselves with even a creak of bone against bone. Gideon’s brain moved and broke against itself like the tiny wavelets they had left, the water lurching restlessly from side to side, until it came to a final conclusion. She closed the gap between them a little, until she could see tiny droplets run down the column of Harrow’s neck and slide beneath her sodden collar. She smelled like ash, even smothered under litres and litres of saline. As she approached Harrow grew very still, and her throat worked, and her eyes

opened black and wide: she looked at Gideon without breathing in, her mouth frozen, her hands unmoving, a perfect bone carving of a person. “One last question for you, Reverend Daughter,” said Gideon. Harrow said, a little unsteadily: “Nav?” Gideon leaned in. “Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?” One of the skeletons punted her back into the water. For all the rest of that evening they were furtive and unwilling to let the other one out of their sight for more than a minute, as though distance would compromise everything all over again—talking to each other as though they’d never had the opportunity to talk, but talking about bullshit, about nothing at all, just hearing the rise and fall of the other one’s voice. That night, Gideon took all her blankets back to the unedifying cavalier bed at the foot of Harrow’s. When they were both lying in bed in the big warm dark, Harrow’s body perpendicular to Gideon’s body, Gideon said: “Did you try to kill me, back on the Ninth?” Harrow was obviously startled into silence. Gideon pressed: “The shuttle. The one Glaurica stole.” “What? No,” said Harrow. “If you’d gotten on that shuttle, you’d have made it safe to Trentham. I swear by the Tomb.” “But—Ortus—Sister Glaurica—” There was a pause. Her necromancer said, “Were meant to be brought back after twenty-four hours, in disgrace, with Ortus declared unfit to hold his post, relegated to the meanest cloister of the House. Not that Ortus would have minded. We had paid off the pilot.” “Then—” “Crux claimed,” said Harrow slowly, “that the shuttle had a fault, and blew up en route.” “And you believed him?” Another pause. Harrow said, “No.” And then: “Above all else, Nav … he couldn’t bear what he saw as disloyalty.”

So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet. She did not say this. Silas Octakiseron knew more than he should, but if Harrow discovered that now, she’d be off down the corridor in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. “What a dope,” she said instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.” “Go to sleep, Gideon.” She fell asleep, and for once didn’t dream of anything at all.

32 “THIS IS CHEATING,” SAID Harrowhark forbiddingly. “We’re just being resourceful,” said Palamedes. They were standing outside a laboratory door that Gideon had never seen. This one had not been hidden, just very inconveniently placed, at the topmost accessible point of the tower: it took more stairs than Gideon’s knees had ever wanted, and was situated plainly at the end of a terrace corridor where the sun slanted in through broken windows. The terrace in question looked so frankly about to disintegrate that Gideon tried to stay close to the corridor’s inside wall, in case most of the floor suddenly decided to fall off the side of Canaan House. This Lyctoral door was the same as the others had been—gaping obsidian eye sockets in carved obsidian temporal bones: black pillars and no handle, and a fretwork symbol to differentiate it from the other two doors Gideon had seen. This one looked like three rings, joined on a line. “We have no key,” Harrow was saying. “This is not entering a locked door with permission.” Palamedes waved a hand. “I completed this challenge. We have the right to the key. That’s basically the same thing.” “That is absolutely not the same thing.”

“Look. If we’re keeping track, which I am, the key for this room currently belongs to Silas Octakiseron. Lady Septimus had it, and he took it off her. That means the only way either of us ever gets inside is by defeating Colum the Eighth in a fair duel—” “I can take Colum,” said Camilla. “Pretty sure I can also take Colum,” added Gideon. “—and then relying on Octakiseron to hand it over. Which he won’t,” concluded Palamedes triumphantly. “Reverend Daughter, you know as well as I do that the Eighth House wouldn’t let a little thing like fair play get in the way of its sacred duty to do whatever it wants.” Harrow looked conflicted. “This is no ordinary lock. We’re not just going to—pick it with a bit of bone, Sextus.” “No, of course not. I told you. Lady Septimus let me hold the key. I’m an adept of the Sixth. She might as well have let me make a silicone mould of the damn thing. I can picture every detail of that key right down to the microscopic level. But what am I going to do by myself, carve a new one out of wood?” Harrow sighed. Then she rummaged in her pocket and took out a little nodule of bone, which she placed in the palm of her right hand. “All right,” she said. “Describe it for me.” Palamedes stared at her. “Hurry up,” she prompted. “I’m not waiting for the Second to find us.” “It—I mean, it looked like a key,” he said. “It had a long shaft and some teeth. I don’t—I can’t just describe a molecular structure like it’s someone’s outfit.” “Then how exactly am I meant to replicate it?” demanded Harrow. “I can’t—oh. No.” “You did Imaging and Response, right? You must have, you got the key for it. Same deal. I’m going to think about the key, and you’re going to see it through my eyes.” “Sextus,” said Harrow darkly. “Wait, wait,” put in Gideon, intrigued. “You’re going to read his mind?” “No,” said both necromancers immediately. Then Palamedes said, “Well, technically, sort of.” “No,” said Harrow. “You remember the construct challenge, Nav. I couldn’t read your mind then. It’s more like borrowing perceptions.” She

turned back to Palamedes. “Sextus, this was bad enough when I did it to my own cavalier. You’re going to have to focus on that key incredibly hard. If you get distracted—” “He doesn’t get distracted,” said Camilla, as if this had caused difficulties in the past. Palamedes closed his eyes. Harrow gnawed on her lip furiously, then closed hers too. Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds. Gideon was dying to make a joke, just to get a reaction, when the tiny lump of matter in Harrow’s palm twitched. It flexed and began to stretch, forming a long, thin, cylindrical rod. Another few seconds passed, and a spine of bone extruded slowly from near one end. Then another. Gideon was honestly impressed. In all the time Harrow had tormented her back on Drearburh, she had only ever used bones as seeds and starters —stitching them together into trip wires, grasping arms, kicking legs, biting skulls. This was something new. She was using bone like clay—a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before. It looked like it was giving her trouble too: her brow was furrowed, and the first faint traces of blood sweat gleamed on her slim throat. “Focus, Sextus,” her necromancer gritted out. The object on her palm was now clearly a key: Gideon could see three individual teeth, twisting and flexing as Harrow filled in the fine detail. The whole length of the key quivered, and looked for a moment as though it would jump off her hand and fall to the floor, but then it abruptly lay still. Harrow opened her eyes, blinked, and peered at it suspiciously. “This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.” “That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce. Palamedes opened his eyes too, and breathed a long sigh of what sounded like relief. “It’ll be fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Come on. Let’s try it out.” He headed for the black stone door, followed by Harrow, both cavaliers, and the five skeletons that Harrow had refused point-blank not to conjure on their way up here. He took the newly formed bone key, examined it, fitted it in the lock, and then turned it decisively to the left.

The mechanism went click. “Oh, my God,” said Harrow. Sextus ran a hand convulsively through his hair. “All right,” he said. “No, I did not actually think that was going to happen. Masterful work, Reverend Daughter—” and he gave her a little mock-bow. “Yes,” said Harrow. “Congratulations to you also, Warden.” He pushed the door open onto total blackness. Harrow stepped closer to Gideon and muttered, “If anything moves—” “Yaaas, I know. Let it head for Camilla.” Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes. But now she stepped forward grandly, spread her palms wide in the necromantic gesture as threatening as a cavalier unsheathing a sword, and strode into the dark. Palamedes went after her, groped around on the wall for a few moments, and then hit the light switch. Gideon stood in the laboratory and stared as Camilla carefully closed the door behind them. This Lyctoral lab was an open-plan bomb wreck. There were three long lab tables covered in old, disused tools, splotches of what looked to be russet fungus, abandoned beakers, and used-up pens. The floor underfoot was hairy carpet, and in one corner there was a hideous, slithery tangle of what Gideon realised must be sleeping bags. In another corner, an ancient chin-up bar sagged in the middle alongside a strip of towel left to hang for a myriad. Everywhere there were bits of paper or shaken-out clothes, as though somebody had left the place in a hurry or had simply been an unbelievable slob. Spotlights shone down hot on the ruined jumble. “Hm,” said Camilla neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organised Palamedes’s and her socks by colour and genre. Harrowhark and Palamedes picked their way through the mess to the tables. Palamedes was saying in his explanation voice: “It’s not as though I didn’t complete this challenge by lunchtime, though I had a distinct advantage. It was a psychometrical challenge. The main difficulty was working out what the challenge wanted in the first place: it was set up by someone with an obscure sense of humour. It was just a room with a table, a locked box, and a single molar.”

“Reconstruction?” “Not all of us can respring a body by dint of a molar, Reverend Daughter. Anyway, I must have examined that tooth for two hours. I know every single thing there is to know about that tooth. Mandibular second, deciduous eruption, vitamin deficiency, male, died in his sixties, flossed obediently, never left the planet. Died in this selfsame tower.” Both of them were riffling through the papers left on the desk: Palamedes left them in forensically exact piles divided by where they had been found. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Then Camilla took over because I wasn’t bloody thinking.” Camilla grunted. She had meandered over to look at the rust-pitted crossbars of the chin-up, and Gideon had repaired to the worm mound of sleeping bags to kick them unhelpfully. Harrow said impatiently, “Get to the denouement, Sextus.” “I had tracked the tooth. It told me nothing—no spiritual links to any part of the building. It was a black hole. It was as though the body it came from had never been alive. No ghost remnants, nothing—this is impossible, you understand, it meant the spirit had somehow been removed entirely. So I did some old-fashioned detective work.” He peered under an abandoned clearfile. “I looked upstairs for the skeleton with the missing upper molar. He wouldn’t come down with me, but he did let me make a plaster impression of his clavicle. The clavicle! Someone was having a joke. Anyway, you can imagine my reaction when I unlocked the box with it and found it empty.” Gideon looked up from a pasteboard box she had found: it was full of the ring tabs you got on pressurised drink cans, and jingled unmusically when she shook it. “The constructs? Like, the bone servants?” “Second’s right, first isn’t,” said Camilla laconically. “They’re the opposite of what Lady Septimus calls the beguiling corpse,” said Palamedes. “They seem to have most of their faculties intact. Mine was very nice, though he’s forgotten how to write. The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll

term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.” Harrowhark slammed a ring-binder down on the bench. “I’m a fool,” she said bitterly. “I knew they moved too well to be constructs—no matter how I tried to mimic how they’d been done. I just could have sworn—but that’s impossible. They’d need someone to control them.” “They do—themselves,” said Palamedes. “They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned. The old fogeys back home would peel their feet for half an hour alone with one. It still doesn’t explain why there’s no energy signature on the bones, though. Anyway, this is the laboratory of the Lyctor who created them—and here’s their theory.” Much like the one back in the other laboratory, the theorem was carved into a big stone slab pinned down in a dusty back corner and covered up with loose-leaf flimsy. Both cavaliers drifted over, and they all together stared at the carved diagrams. The laboratory was very quiet and the spotlights haloed streams of dust so thick you could lick them. Resting on the edge of the stone set into the table, there was a tooth. Palamedes picked it up. It was a premolar, with long and horrible roots: it was brown with age. He handed it to Harrow, who gently unfolded it in the way that only a bone magician could and in the way that always made Gideon’s jaw hurt. She turned it into a long ribbon of enamel, an orange with the skin taken off and flattened, a three-dimensional object turned twodimensional. Written on the tooth in tiny, tiny letters was this: FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY IT IS FINISHED! Harrowhark took out her fat black journal and was scribbling down notes, but Palamedes had abruptly lost interest in the theory stone. He was looking at the walls instead, flipping open some of the ring-binders that she had discarded. He stopped in front of a faded pinboard, riddled thick with pins, all with bits of string attached. Gideon came to stand next to him.

“Look at this,” he said. There were rainbow splotches of pins all over the board. There were tiny clusters, and Gideon noticed that at the centre of each cluster there was one white pin; the smallest and most numerous clusters had three pins fixed around one white pin. Some others had five or six. Then there were two other separate whorls of pins, each made up of dozens alone, and then one enormous pin-splotch: more than a hundred of them in a rainbow of colours, thickly clustered around one in white. “The problem of necromancy,” said Palamedes, “is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything … we’re glass cannons. Our military survives because we have hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men and women with big swords.” “There’s always more thanergy to feed from, Sextus,” said Harrow distantly, flicking her eyes back and forth as she copied. “Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes.” “Yes, but that’s the problem, isn’t it; ten minutes, then you need more. Thanergy’s transient. A necromancer’s biggest threat is honestly themselves. My whole House for a reliable food source—” “Warden,” said Camilla, quite suddenly. She had opened up a ring-binder untidy with pages. Inside were an array of old flimsy lithographs, the black-and-white kind. On the very first page there was a faded note that had once been yellow, the letters still legible in a short, curt hand: CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY HIGHLIGHTED BEST OPTION ASK E.J.G. YRS, ANASTASIA. P.S. GIVE ME BACK MY CALIPERS I NEED THEM Camilla flipped through the binder. The pictures were hasty, low-quality snaps of men and women from the shoulders up, squinting at the camera, eyes half-shut as though they hated the light: most of them looked very serious and solemn, as though posing for a mugshot. Some of these men

and women had been crossed out. Some had a few ticks against their picture. Camilla thumbed a page over, and they all paused. The overexposure did not disguise a head-and-shoulders photo of the man they all called Teacher, bright blue eyes a desaturated sepia, still smiling from a lifetime away. He looked not a day older or younger. And his photograph had been ringed around in a black marker pen. “Sextus,” Harrow began, ominously. “I couldn’t tell,” said Palamedes. For his part, he sounded almost dazed. “Ninth, I absolutely could not tell. Another beguiling corpse?” “Then who’s controlling him? There’s nobody here but us, Sextus.” “I’d like to hope so. Could he be independent? But how—” Palamedes’s eyes drifted back to the pinboard. He took his spectacles off and squinted his lambent grey eyes at it. He was counting under his breath. Gideon followed along with him gamely up into the hundreds until a dreadful noise startled them out of any mental arithmetic. It was an electronic klaxon. From somewhere within the room—and without—it howled: BRRRRAAARRP  … BRRRRARRRRP  … BRRRRARRRRRP … This was followed by, bafflingly, a woman’s voice, unreasonably calm. “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way to designated safe zones, led by your fire warden.” Then the klaxon again: BRRRARRRRP  … BRRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRRRRRP … and the exact same recorded inflexion: “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way…” They looked at each other. Then all four of them sprinted for the door. Palamedes didn’t even stop to shut it behind them. The Sixth and the Ninth Houses knew that a fire was absolutely no joke, and moved like people who had learned that a fire alarm could be the last thing any of them heard, the last thing their whole House heard. But this was curious. There was no smoke to smell, nor any latent heat: when they all got to the atrium, the only thing they saw amiss was that one of the skeletons had fallen over with an armful of towels, spread-eagle in the awful dried-up fountain. Camilla looked around, narrowed her eyes, and headed toward the lunch room. Here there was an ongoing pssshhhtt sound that Gideon could not identify until they reached the kitchen—there was a bad smell, and white steam—and realised it was a water sprinkler, the really old kind. They all

squashed themselves through the kitchen door and stood out of the reach of the spray. All the skeletons were gone. In their places were untidy piles of bones and sashes. A pan of fish smoked on a lit stove: Gideon waded in, kicked aside a humerus, and fumbled with the knobs until the fire extinguished. There were piles of bones at the sink, a skull floating in a familiar pot of green soup: the tap had been left on, and the sink was close to overflowing. A pile of bones had mixed in among the potato peelings. Gideon ducked back out and away from the spray and stared. She was only vaguely aware of Harrowhark disdainfully mopping her wet head with a handkerchief. The sprinklers stopped. Camilla knelt down and, amidst all the dripping and burbling, touched one of the phalanges that had fallen on the tiles. It dissolved into ash like a sigh. Palamedes went and turned off the tap like someone in a dream. The bones in the sink gently bobbed against a saucepan. He and Harrow looked at each other and said— “Shit.” With only the faintest liquid whisper of metal on sheath, Camilla drew her swords. Gideon had never had the opportunity to study Camilla’s two short swords before: they were more like very long daggers, slightly curved at each end, wholly utilitarian. They glittered clean and hot beneath the soggy light of the kitchen; she marched back toward the door to the dining hall. “Split up?” she said. “Hell no,” said Gideon. Harrow said, “Let’s not waste time. Get to Septimus,” and Gideon could have kissed her. There seemed to be nobody else in the long, echoing halls of Canaan House, now longer and more echoey than ever. They passed another skeleton, arrested by an unseen force in the middle of carrying a basket. As it tumbled to the floor the weight of the basket had crushed its brittle pelvis to a powder. When they got to Dulcinea’s sickroom, Gideon had a sharp moment of not knowing what the hell to expect; but they found Dulcinea, struggling feebly to try to sit up, whey-faced and wide-eyed. Opposite her was the salt-and-pepper priest in the high-backed chair, looking as though they were peacefully asleep.

“It wasn’t me,” Dulcinea wheezed, in no small alarm. Camilla ducked forward. The white-robed priest’s chin had slumped forward to their chest, and the braid was tucked beneath their chin. As Camilla pressed her hand to their neck, the priest lurched very gently sideways, limp and heavy, until the Sixth cavalier had to prop them up so that they wouldn’t slide off the chair entirely. “Dead as space,” said Harrowhark, “though, accurately, that’s been true for a very, very long time.” Palamedes turned to Dulcinea, who had given up thrashing her way to her elbows and was lying flat on the pillows, panting in exertion. He brushed her hair gently away from her forehead and said, “Where’s Teacher?” “He left me maybe an hour ago,” said Dulcinea helplessly, eyes darting between him and the rest of them. “He said he wanted to lock a door. What’s going on? Why is the priest dead? Where did Teacher go?” Palamedes patted her hand. “No idea. This is the interesting part.” “Dulcinea,” said Gideon, “are you going to be okay by yourself?” Dulcinea grinned. Her tongue was scarlet with blood. The veins in her eyelids were so dark and prominent that the blue of her eyes appeared a limpid, moonless purple. “What can anyone do to me now?” she said simply. They could not even warn her not to let anyone in: she seemed exhausted simply from the act of sitting up. They left her with only the dead priest for company and headed to a wing where Gideon had never gone: the hot, sultry corridor lined with fibrous green plants of all sorts, the wing where the priests and Teacher lived. It was a pretty, whitewashed passageway, totally out of kilter with the rest of Canaan House. The light bounced off the walls from the clean, wellkept windows. There was no need to knock at the doors or yell to find the action; at the end of the corridor, there was an absolute pile-up of bones, sashes, and the laid-out body of the other wizened priest. He had collapsed flat on his face with his arms outstretched, as if he had tripped while running. The bones were all piled up outside a closed door, as though they had been trying to get through it. Palamedes led the way, crunching through the

wreckage. Gideon put her hand on the hilt of her sword, and Palamedes threw open the door. Inside, Captain Deuteros looked up, somewhat wearily. She was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, wizened and crumpled. Gideon did not want to look at it. It looked like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years and then stuck back on. Her right arm was tucked up against her stomach. There was an enormous crimson stain spreading out onto the perfect white of her jacket, and her right hand was clasped, as though ready to draw, around the enormous bone shard shoved deep in her gut. Teacher lay unmoving by her side. There was a rapier buried in his chest, and a dagger through his neck. There was no blood around the blades, only great splashes of it at his sleeves and his girdle. Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn’t need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce. “He wouldn’t listen to reason,” said Judith Deuteros, in measured tones. “He became aggressive when I attempted to restrain him. Binding spells proved—useless. Marta used disabling force. He was the one to escalate the situation—he blew out her eye, so I was compelled to respond  … This didn’t—it didn’t have to happen.” Two professional Cohort soldiers, one a necromancer, one a cavalier primary; all this mess for one unearthly old man. Palamedes dropped to his knees beside the captain, but she pushed him away, roughly, with the tip of her boot. “Do something for her,” she said. “Captain,” said Camilla, “Lieutenant Dyas is dead.” “Then don’t touch me. We did what we came to do.” Gideon’s eyes were drawn to a machine in the corner. She hadn’t noticed it because it seemed ridiculously normal, but it wasn’t normal at all, not for Canaan House. It was an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic. The antenna was set out the window, glowing faint and blue in the afternoon sunshine. “Captain,” said Palamedes, “what did you come to do?” The Second necromancer shifted, grunted in pain, closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and a bead of sweat travelled down her temple.

“Save our lives,” she said. “I sent an SOS. Backup’s coming, Warden … it’s just up to you to make sure nobody else dies … He said I’d betrayed the Emperor … said I’d put the Emperor at risk … I entered the Emperor’s service when I was six.” Captain Deuteros’s chin was drooping. She lifted it back up with some effort. “He wasn’t human,” she said. “He wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Marta put him down—Marta … Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth.” Palamedes had ignored the kick and moved in again. The Second laid one booted foot on his shoulder in warning. He said, “Captain, you are no use to anyone dead.” “It is my privilege to no longer be of use,” said the captain. “We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could … did what we had to do … and paid for it, dearly.” Harrow had gone to stand over the quiet, punctured corpse of Teacher. She dropped to his side like a long-tailed crow. All Gideon could do was press herself back up against the wall, smell the blood, and feel absurdly empty. Her necromancer said, “You fixed nothing.” “Harrow,” Palamedes said warningly. “This man was a shell filled with a hundred souls,” said Harrow. The captain’s eyes flicked open, and stayed open. “He was a thing of ridiculous power—but he was a prototype. I doubt he had killed anyone before today. I would be astonished if he had a hand in the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, as he was created for the sole purpose of safeguarding the place. There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is. But now you’re going to die too, and you’ll never know the whole story.” The whites of Judith’s eyes were very white, her carefully merciless face suddenly a picture of hesitation. Her gaze moved, more remorselessly than Gideon’s ever could have, to her cavalier; then she returned it to them, halffurious, half-beseeching. Palamedes moved in. “I can’t save you,” he said. “I can’t even make you comfortable. A team of trained medics could do both. How far away is the Second? How long do we have to wait for Cohort backup?” “The Second’s not coming,” said Captain Deuteros.

She smiled, tight and bitter. “There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses  … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.” Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled. “You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,” said the dead man, with a thin and reedy whistle of a voice around the blade in his vocal cords. His whole body wriggled. His dead eyes no longer twinkled drunkenly, but his tongue slithered. His spine arched. “Oh, Lord—Lord— Lord, one of them has come back—” His voice trailed off. His body collapsed to the floor. The silence in the wake of his settling was huge and loathsome. Palamedes said, “Judith—” “Give me her sword,” she said. The rapier was too heavy for her to hold. Camilla laid it over the necromancer’s knees, and Judith’s fingers closed around it. The steel of the hilt was bright in her hand. She squeezed down until her knuckles were white. “At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in. “No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now … nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.” The last Gideon ever saw of Captain Judith Deuteros was her propped up on the armchair, sitting as straight as she could possibly manage, bleeding out through the terrible wound at her gut. They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.

33 IT SEEMED AS THOUGH just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare. “The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?” Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.” “That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—” Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?” “Brother Asht saw the Third leave the morgue this morning, but we have not seen them since,” said Silas. “They are not in their quarters and the facility hatch is locked. We are compelled to join forces. Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.”

“Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon. The Eighth cavalier said heavily, “Come and see.” It couldn’t have been an ambush. There was one House versus two. And for once, Silas Octakiseron seemed genuinely jumpy. Gideon hung back near Harrowhark as the grisly procession made its way down through the hallways again, to the atrium, working their way toward the dining hall and the makeshift morgue off the kitchen. Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—” “Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?” “Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—” “Run like hell,” said Gideon. “I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow. The morgue was dreary and chill and serene. The anxiety of the rest of Canaan House had not touched it. It was getting to be untenably full: the two teens were still safely away in their cold iron drawers, and Protesilaus was in situ, though he was a head without the body. As it would have been difficult to cram all of him in, this was maybe a blessing in disguise. Magnus was also laid out on his own slab, a little too tall for comfort: but his wife— Abigail’s body had been left out, pulled fully away from its niche. She was still cold and ashen-faced and dead. Her shirt had been rolled up to her ribs. With no great elegance, a knife had been used to open up her abdomen on the right side of her body. There was a big bloodless hole there the size of a fist. Their unseemly interest never quenched, both of the Sixth House immediately peered into the wound. Camilla flicked on her pocket torch. Harrow crowded in beside them while Gideon stayed to watch the Eighth. Silas looked as wan and uncomfortable as Abigail did; his cavalier was as impassive as ever, and he did not meet Gideon’s eye.

“The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the— no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.” “Magnifier?” “Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while  … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!” The rest of the room jumped. But nothing had bitten Palamedes, except maybe internally: he was staring off into the middle distance, horrified. He looked as though he had just been given a piece of chocolate cake and found, after two bites, half a spider. “My timing was wrong,” he said softly, to himself, and again more waspishly: “Nonagesimus. My timing was wrong.” “Use your words, Sextus.” “Why didn’t I investigate Abigail before—The Fifth went down into the facility—they must have completed a challenge. The night of the dinner. Pent was nobody’s fool. They were caught out on the top of the stairs coming back. Something was hidden inside her to avoid detection—God knows why she did it, or why anyone did it—three inches long, metal, shaft, teeth—” “A key,” said Silas. “But that’s insane,” said Gideon. “Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.” Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?” Harrow stared at him. “You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?” “I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas. “I hate this House. I

despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third.” Palamedes wiped his hands dry on a piece of towelling and pushed his glasses up his nose. They had fogged up from his breath, in that cold and quiet place. “Master Octakiseron,” he said, “you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent. I know which door this opens, as does the Ninth. And, we have to assume, so does the Third. I know where they’ll be, and I want to see what they’ve found—” “Before it is too late,” said Harrow. She went over to the racks of bodies, and she opened up one last slab that Gideon had forgotten about entirely. It was the sad pile of cremains and bone that they had found in the furnace. The biggest bits of the corpses were no bigger than a thumbnail. Surprising Gideon—yet again—it was Colum who moved opposite to Harrow, gesturing to the bones and the ashes almost impatiently. “This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.” “I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.” “The other half is someone else,” said Silas. “We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.” As it turned out, he was wrong.

34 SIX OF THEM WALKED the dim hallways of Canaan House: three necromancers, three cavaliers. Every so often they would come across the fallen-down body of a skeletal servant, still and grinning emptily up at the ceiling, the chains that had bound them to this tower finally broken. Gideon found the sight of the little heaps and piles weirdly distressing. They had been walking around for ten thousand years, probably, and after two moments of panic and tragedy it was all over. The priests of the First House were gone. Maybe it was relief, or maybe it was sacrilege. Gideon wondered what her state of mind would be after a whole myriad: bored as hell, probably. Desperate to do anything or be anyone else. She would have done everything there was to do, and if she hadn’t seen it, she could probably imagine what it looked like. They followed Harrow’s map to the hallway of the stopped-up Lyctor door. The lock still carried the mark of the regenerating bone that had been such a bastard to remove. The stark painting of the waterless canyon had been taken away, and now all three necromancers stood silently before the great black pillars and bizarre carvings above. Silas said, “I feel no wards here.” Harrow said, “It’s a lure.” “Or carelessness,” said Palamedes.